The White People and Other Weird Stories Read Free Page A

successive waves of fully human peoples—perform a hideous ritual around a pyramid of fire, “The Shining Pyramid” is perhaps too much of a detective story to be fully effective as a weird tale. But what might be called the “Little People mythology” (perhaps most exhaustively treated in “Novel of the Black Seal”) is of some interest in itself. Machen makes it clear that he himself believed in the former existence of just such a race of creatures as he depicts in these stories:
    Of recent years abundant proof has been given that a short, non-Aryan race once dwelt beneath ground, in hillocks, throughout Europe, their raths have been explored, and the weird old tales of green hills all lighted up at night have received confirmation. Much in the old legends may be explained by a reference to this primitive race. The stories of changelings, and captive women, become clear on the supposition that the “fairies” occasionally raided the houses of the invaders. 2
    This was written more than two decades before the publication of Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which gave a momentary stamp of approval to the thesis. But Machen knew that the really adventuresome aspect of his theory—or, rather, the radical extension of it that he made for fictional purposes—was that “the people still lived in hidden caverns in wild and lonely lands,” something he maintained was “wildly improbable.” 3
    But behind all this speculative anthropology is the symbolism of the Little People. They are horrible and loathsome, to be sure, but they have at least one advantage over modern human beings: They have retained that primal sacrament (perverted, of course, by bestiality and violence) that links them with the Beyond. There is something of awe mingled with the horror experienced by the narrators when they witness the “pyramid of fire” summoned by the Little People in “The Shining Pyramid,” and this signals the truth uttered by the protagonist of “The White People”: “Sorcery and sanctity . . . these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”
    Probably Machen’s most sustained weird work is The Three Impostors, published in 1895. Also poorly received, it was criticized for being excessively imitative of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is commonly believed that the model for the novel—both in its episodic structure and in its somewhat flippant and jaunty style—is Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882); but the true model is that novel’s sequel, The Dynamiter (1885), written by Stevenson in conjunction with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Machen ultimately acknowledged this criticism, and for the next two years he worked with difficulty, even agony, to hammer out his own style; the result is that luminous novel of aesthetic sincerity, The Hill of Dreams.
    What is The Three Impostors ? On the surface, it appears to be a random collection of episodes strung together with the flimsiest kind of narrative thread. One episode—“Novel of the Iron Maid”—had in fact been written and published in 1890, and for copyright reasons it and its introductory segment (“The Decorative Imagination”) do not appear in many American editions of the novel. Other episodes—notably the celebrated “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”—have been abstracted from the narrative fabric and reprinted as self-standing stories. This occurred on several occasions during Machen’s lifetime, and he appears to have registered no great complaint; but Machen was scarcely in a position to do so, as the period between 1901 and 1931 (when he received a Civil List pension of £100 a year) was of considerable poverty for him, and he could ill afford to pass up any revenue his writings yielded.
    Both the title and the